7 Marketing Offers for Lead Generation

Have you ever shared your contact details with a random stranger just because they requested you to?

……..

Didn’t think so!

What about when you are out shopping, when your billing assistant asks you to fill out a form for a chance to win a gift voucher?

I have – even at times when I was in a rush.

There are two things at play here – credibility (of the shopping mall – also, honestly, the billing assistant already has your credit card in his hand), and self-benefit (no matter how far-fetched it might seem)

Lead generation campaigns follow a similar rationale.

Credibility is a topic for another time – let’s talk about self-benefit today.

In plain terms, you need to give some benefit – tangible or intangible in exchange for whatever information you expect people to share with you. Also, the perceived benefit of this offer must be higher than its perceived cost. For instance, if you ask for a visitor’s name and email ID in exchange for an e-book, it’s all right. However, asking for their credit card information at this point would be insane.

So, what would make a good lead generation offer? It should solve some business or personal problem (self-benefit).

It should have a high perceived value by your target audience. Let’s discuss a few very obvious (but still unused) offers that will help you generate high quality leads.

Blog Subscription

If you produce high-quality content, this would be the most obvious top of the funnel offer you can provide. You already have the content; you are just asking people to be notified whenever you publish something new. However, I have seen businesses with great blogs, who don’t have a blog subscription form in place.

We have seen this work well for plenty of clients in education – they just have video tutorials, opportunities, news around the courses they are trying to sell, and are doing pretty well with it.

It would work well for businesses in all segments, be it B2B or B2C, because most people are on the web trying to consume content.

E-Books/Whitepapers

E-Books and whitepapers are without a doubt, a great way to package and share your knowledge and experience. They are perceived as a high value offer and make it easy for visitors to trade their contact information for the E-Book.It is a unique marketing tool as it is subtle in nature and enhances brand recall.

One challenge that many small businesses face in giving away e-books as an offer, is the lack of expertise in creating them. However, if you lack the talent or the bandwidth in-house, you can easily find help at freelancing websites like Upwork (formerly O Desk and Elance), Growthgeeks etc.

You can even collaborate with industry experts to put together a co-branded e-book. It would work great from the perspective of providing in-depth knowledge (so, higher perceived value for the prospects), as well as for easier and more widespread distribution, and recognition of your brand name.

Expert Webinars

 Webinar reach a highly targeted audience – either live or on demand – quickly and efficiently. They generate a lower cost per lead and high level of engagement with prospective clients.Live webinars can be re-broadcast as on-demand versions, thus enabling knowledge-sharing and optimum utilization of interesting content.

They are user-friendly, as no travel or accommodation costs involved, and can be searched online and referred tofor specific content afterwards.They achieve greater reach at a generally lower cost than face-to-face meetings or workshops or seminar since the take place online, making it available to anyone with internet connection across the globe.

So many benefits right there.

This can be a goldmine for B2B businesses, as you are not only creating a lot of engagement, but you are providing a lot of value to your webinar attendees as well, thus giving you an authority in your field. This once again would help you generate more leads.

For us, at least, webinars have proved to be a great way to both generate and engage leads. I have seen them work across several other industries as well – most notably, education.

Quizzes

Quizzes are a great way to both engage your audience, and capture leads as well. It is usually cost effective to setup and run.We were able to increase engagement by several hundred percentages on one of our education clients’ websites by creating simple quizzes and sharing them every week.

With the right repository of questions and an easy to use tool (we were using WordPress plugin MTouch in this particular case), creating a good enough quiz would hardly be an hour’s job; much lesser if you have a set format to follow. Other tools to check out are Quizzr, Proprofs and many more.

Free Product Trial or Consultation Session

Free trials or consultation sessions drive new leads into your marketing funnel.

Free trial

You will generate high quality leads, and would get valuable feedback about the kind of actual questions/problems your target audience has.

 Free consultation

You get the opportunity to interact with potential customers and assess their needs and requirements.

Bonus

In case of free trial, you can also analyze the users’ activity in the product and learn the features of most interest to your users and features your users don’t care about. In case of free consultation, the feedback from users will help you modify your offerings to tailor to the market requirements.

 Discounts

A discount offer should be time bound.It should be perceived as good value to drive interest in the offer. Discounts are typically used to: close a sale, liquidate inventory, match the competition offer,meet financial goals or targets.

So, if you are in an industry where discounts are possible, and make sense, you should do it.

Giveaways

All of these offers we discussed are giveaways right. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s call marketing offers of direct value to the user / prospect, as giveaways. For instance, gift cards, coupons, etc. They can be used by businesses for a variety of reasons –encouraging the audience to participate in surveys, promote an event, drive foot falls, encourage users to try something new and so on.

It can also be given as an act of goodwill – for instance you can just send across a book to a loyal customer. They’d love you for it, and it would be of value to them, right. So, there’s that.

What will these cost you?

There are several great marketing offers that you can use for your lead generation campaigns; these are just a few to begin with. Let me know of a few offers that you have found success with.

Aurhored by Nilesh Patel, CEO, LeadSquared